Mera Wolf and Todd Moore

Todd Moore is best known for his long poem DILLINGER. Since 1970 he has written and published more than a hundred books and chapbooks and his poetry has appeared in more than a thousand literary journals and magazines. He is one of the founders of the Outlaw Poetry Movement. He will be reading from his recent chapbooksRelentless and Tell the Corpse a Story. Both books deal with the Dillinger mythos.

Mera Wolf, when recently asked by a young woman to describe her profession, responded,“I’m a cosmologist.” “That’s just wonderful,”replied the young woman, “Do you also do nails?”After 35 years of learning, volunteering, working, child-raising, writing, and teaching, Wolf earned her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 2002. Currently, while still juggling all six activities, she is writing a novel in serial form, and completing a screenplay. Mera Wolf is the author of two chapbooks, May Day and Lost Things.

Much more on Todd Moore can be found by clickinghere… and in our THE SHOP section here…

Lee Sharkey bought in 1974 a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type and print, and produced over the course of a long Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Over the next four years, under the imprint South Solon Press, she printed two more chapbooks of her own poetry, portfolios of other poets’ work, and ephemera such as poems on paper lunch bags. Since then, she has continued to work both on and off the grid as a writer and an editor. Her publications include two other full-length volumes, Farmwife (Puckerbrush Press, 1977) and To A Vanished World(Puckerbrush, 1995), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust. In 1997 she received Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché. Recent poems have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Margie, Nimrod, The Pinch, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. Since 2003 she has co-edited The Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest and most respected poetry journals.

She lives in the woods outside of Farmington, Maine, with her husband, Al Bersbach, and stands in the weekly Women in Black peace vigil in front of the Farmington post office.

Margaret Randall

Reads. Recorded in Albuquerque, NM February 21, 2008

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. Born in New York City in 1936, she has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the turbulent 1960s she co-founded and co-edited EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities. In 1984, Margaret came home to the United States, only to be ordered deported when the government invoked the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, judging opinions expressed in some of her books to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights defended her and many writers and others joined in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of citizenship. She won her case in 1989. In 1990 she was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression; and in 2004 was the first recipient of PEN New Mexico’s Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism.

John Macker

Reads at Acequia Booksellers in Albuquerque, NM January 2008

John Macker’s most recent book is “Adventures In The Gun Trade”(Denver: Long Road/La Cantera Press, 2004) and he has completed a cd calledblack/wing“Wyoming Arcane.” Also nominated for 2006 Pushcart Prize. (Oct ’05, October 07) with John Knoll. He Lives with wife, Annie, a few miles south of Las Vegas, NM with some cool views of the llano. Recent poetry published in magaziness & anthologies including Manzanita Quarterly, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, mad blood #’s 1 & 2, Pinyon Poetry (Mesa State College.), & Poets For Peace, cd, (Santa Fe.) Won 2006 mad blood magazine literary arts award for poem,

Albert Huffstickler – ‘Huff’ –

Reads. Recorded in Austin, TX 1987-9 and Bisbee, AZ 1991

Albert Huffstickler (December 17, 1927 – February 25, 2002) was an American poet. Albert Huffstickler was born in Laredo, Texas, surviving a twin who died at birth. As the son of a teacher and soldier, he and his two siblings (a brother and a sister) moved often growing up. After graduating from high school, he worked in Charlotte prior to attending the University of North Carolina where he discovered poetry. Marriage and children followed as well as various jobs in Florida and Arizona, where he briefly studied Scientology. Drafted in 1954, he spent two years in the army. After completing armed service he returned to Texas where he attended Southwest Texas State University, majoring in English and developing an interest in Jungian psychology. During the 1960’s Huffstickler continued writing poetry as well as pulp fiction, publishing under a pseudonym.

In 1973 he began working at the Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until retirement at the age of 62. While in Austin he began the Hyde Park Poets Series, where he was known as the “Bard of Hyde Park” and taught poetry seminars, inspiring other well-known Austin poets including W. Joe Hoppe. He won the first of two Austin Book Awards in 1989 for Walking Wounded, published by Backyard Press. In 1989 the Texas state legislature honored his poetry. The second Austin Book Award was forWorking on My Death Chant, published in 1991. A 1990 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review article reporting on an interview by Felicia Mitchell described Huffstickler’s natural poetic voice as an attempt “to meld the human voice with the poetic spirit to present a highly charged, story-filled verse.”

Huffstickler published hundreds of poems in his lifetime in both chapbooks and academic and underground journals. A longtime relationship with Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream led to numerous publications in that journal. He published many of his own poems under his Press of Circumstance imprint. Huffstickler’s over thirty collections include Working On My Death Chant, The Cosmology of Madness and Dishwashers and Other Forgotten Angels. The Wander Years was published in 1998 by SRLR Press. Why I Write In Coffee Houses and Diners, a collection of selected poems, was published in 2000 by IUniverse. Poems were also antholgized in Grow Old Along with Me: The Best is Yet to Be (edited by Sandra Martz for Papier Mache Press, 1996) and I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: A Book of Her Poems & His Poems Collected in Pairs (edited by Naomi Shihab Nye & Paul B. Janeczko for Simon & Schuster, 1998). Late in life, Huffstickler took up painting, sometimes selling his artwork or showing it in local venues. He also did volunteer work in hospitals, including the state hospital, and other care facilities. A film documentary on Huffstickler, Holy Secrets, by Matthew Listiak, highlights his personality and poetry. A longtime resident of Hyde Park neighborhood in Austin, Texas, Huffstickler died on 25 February 2002, of an aneurysm.

David Benedetti

David Benedetti is the author of The Internal Weather (1971), Nictitating Membrane (1976), Social Climax Text (1981), and Defense Mechanism (1986). He currently lives in Albuquerque, NM.

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Gary Brower

Reads. Recorded in Magdalena, NM November 2007

Gary L. Brower who holds a B.A. degree from Drury University in Spanish & History, M.A. & Ph.D. degrees in Romance Languages & Literatures from the University of Missouri at Columbia, has taught at Baker University (Ks.), Rogue Community College (Or.), University of Kansas, University of New Mexico, University of Southern California, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at San Diego (visiting), as well as directing academic programs in Barcelona & Madrid, Spain, and Guadalajara, Mexico. A specialist in Hispanic Literature, especially of Latin America, he has published numerous essays in Spanish and English on writers such as Angel Gonzalez, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Manoel Bandeira, Ernesto Sabato, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada & others, in various academic journals. He has also written two books on the impact of Japanese haiku on western poetry: The Haiku in Spanish American Poetry(Ann Arbor, University Micro) & An Annotated Bibliography of Haiku In Western Languages(with D. W. Foster), (Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow Press). An associate editor of American Haiku magazine in its heydey, he also translated poems of Angel Gonzalez& Pablo Neruda.

And he has worked as a journalist in the English-language press of Los Angeles, including the positions of news editor & managing editor of a daily newspaper. In addition: he has worked with the southern Oregon Mexican migrant farmworker community, producing & directing a monthly Spanish-language PBS-TV program, “Quinto Sol”, (KSYS-TV, Medford, Or.), an ESL Outreach Program (Rogue River Community College) to migrant camps, the Jackson County (Or.) Hispanic Library Access Program & editing a weekly Spanish-language newspaper, which he founded, El Noticiero. He has worked with the Oregon Committee for the Humanities (Hispanic film program) & received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Carpenter Foundation, Del Amo Foundation, Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation & various universities.

His poetry (& translations from Hispanic poetry) have been published in magazines such as Puerto del Sol, The Poetry Bag, Put Poems, Tansy, Sagitario, Cottonwood Review, New America, Ann Arbor Review, New Mexico Magazine, Mundus Artium, 10.5 Arts Magazine, The Signpost, Ke5tra, Beatlick Poetry & Art News, The Rag, Sin Fronteras, The Peace of the Night (chapbook anthology), Saintvituspress.com, In Darkness, Memory (chapbook anthology), saintelizabethstreet.org, Sage Trail, Lunarosity.com & Central Avenue. He is currently one of the organizers of the Duende Poetry Series of Placitas and a chapbook, Planting Trees in Terra Incognita (Albuquerque, Destructible Heart Press) was issued in 2006. Another, The Book of Knots, (also Destructible Heart Press), was issued in 2007, as well as a broadside (with photographer David Cramer) “For the Wild Horses of Placitas,” a photo-poem, (June, 2007) & a CD-Gary Brower Reads (Vox Audio, 2008). He has read widely with guitarist El Nino David & dancer Susannah Garrett at such venues as the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque (Homenaje al poeta Angel Gonzalez), the Sunflower Festival in Mountainair, Duende Poetry Series, etc., & on CDs “A Tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca” (Vox Audio, 2007), “Duende & Friends read in Placitas” (Vox Audio, 2006). He has also taught classes on Hispanic literature for the Oasis program in Albuquerque. Born in Kansas City, Mo., he now lives in Placitas, NM. Gary Brower books can be purchased here…

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Michael Rothenberg and David Meltzer

at the Outpost in Albuquerque, NM October 12, 2007

David Meltzer, a leading poet of the Beat Movement, was raised in Brooklyn during the War years; performed on radio & early TV on the Horn & Hardart Children¹s Hour. Was exiled to L.A. at 16 & at 17 enrolled in an ongoing academy w/ artists Wallace Berman, George Herms, Robert Alexander, Cameron; migrated to San Francisco in l957 for higher education w/ peers & maestros like Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Jack Hirschman, a cast of thousands all living extraordinary ordinary lives. Beat Thing [La Alameda Press, 2004] won the Josephine Miles PEN Award, 2005. Was editor and interviewer for San Francisco Beat: Talking With The Poets [City Lights, 2001]. With Steve Dickison, co-edits Shuffle Boil, a magazine devoted to music in all its appearances & disappearances. 2005 saw the publication of David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer by Viking/Penguin, a collection spanning over forty years of work that paints a vivid portrait of Meltzer’s life as a poet through poems taken from thirty of his previous books of poetry. With a versatile style and playful tone, Meltzer offers his unique vision of civilization with a range of juxtapositions from Jewish mysticism and everyday life to jazz and pop culture. Please visit David Meltzer’s web site by clicking here…

Michael Rothenberg is a poet, songwriter, and editor of Big Bridge magazine online at http://www.bigbridge.org. His poetry books include Man/Woman, a collaboration with Joanne Kyger, The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), and Unhurried Vision (La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press). His poems have been published widely in small press publications including, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Berkeley Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, First Intensity, Fish Drum, Fulcrum, Golden Handcuffs Review, House Organ, Prague Literary Review, Tricycle, Van Gogh’s Ear, Vanitas, Zyzzyva, JACK, and Jacket. He is also author of the novel Punk Rockwell. Rothenberg’s 2005 CD collaboration with singer Elya Finn, was praised by poet David Meltzer as “fabulous-all [the] songs sound like Weimar Lenya & postwar Nico, lushly affirmative at the same time being edged w/ cosmic weltschmertz. An immensely tasty production.” He is also editor for the Penguin Poet series, which includes selected works of Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer and Ed Dorn. He has recently completed the Collected Poems of Philip Whalen for Wesleyan University Press.

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Jeffrey Lee and David Abel

Read at Acequia Booksellers in Albuquerque, NM June 2007

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Burt Hatlen

New Poems. Recorded in Bangor and Orono, ME June 2006-7

Burton Norval Hatlen (April 9, 1936 – January 21, 2008) was an American literary scholar and professor at the University of Maine. Harlen worked closely with Carroll F. Terrell, an Ezra Pound scholar and co-founder of the National Poetry Foundation, to build the Foundation into an internationally known institution. Hatlen was seen as a mentor by several of his former students, most notably author Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha King. In a postscript included in his 2006 novel, Lisey’s Story, King said of Hatlen, “Burt was the greatest English teacher I ever had.”

Burton Hatlen was born in April 9, 1936, in Santa Barbara, California. His parents, Julius and Lily Hatlen, were Norwegian American immigrants who sometimes spoke Norwegian at home. Julius worked as a farm worker, but eventually ran his own apricot orchard. The couple, who were Lutherans, had three sons of which Burton was the youngest. Hatlen received a full scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He later earned two separate master’s degrees from both Harvard University and Columbia University. Following his master’s, Hatlen taught at colleges in both Tennessee and Ohio. Hatlen finally earned his doctorate from the University of California, Davis in 1973. His doctoral dissertation was on the 17th century English poet, John Milton.

Hatlen and his first wife, Barbara Karlson, had two daughters. The couple moved to Orrington, Maine, in 1967 and later divorced. He married his second wife, Virginia Nees-Hatlen, an English professor, in 1983. Hatlen arrived at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine, in 1967. He quickly became an active and, by all accounts, highly devoted faculty member in the school’s Department of English. Hatlen often juggled heavy teaching and research schedules. He eventually became chair of the department, where he oversaw academic grant applications, nationwide promotions and academic tenures, and a host of other responsibilities. Hatlen delivered more than 100 academic papers from 1977 to 2007 alone, at conferences ranging from Finland, Canada, the United States, London and Paris.

Hatlen never published a collection of his own scholarly writings. However, his poetics and other writings often appeared in literary scholarly journals. He also contributed his writings to local Maine newspapers occasionally. Hatlen received the UM Presidential Research and Creative Achievement Award for his work in 1996. In 1999, Harlen volunteered to cut his salary so the Department of English could hire two new professors, instead of only one. He continued to work part time, even when he became ill, though he carried a full time work load. He spent the later part of his academic career focusing on writing his poetry. Hatlen was known as a campus activist. He marched against both the Vietnam War in the 1960s, as well as the War in Iraq, as recently as 2007, in Bangor, Maine. He began working with Carroll Terrell shortly after his arrival at the University of Maine. Terrell is best known as a noted Ezra Pound scholar and the founder of the National Poetry Foundation. Together, Terrell and Hatlen, in conjunction with the University of Maine English department, built the Foundation into an internationally known and respected academic center based at UM. Under Terrell and Hatlen, the Foundation focused on the works of Ezra Pound, as well as modern and contemporary forms of poetry.

One of the academic missions of the National Poetry Foundation was the publication of two journals, the Paideumaand the Sagetrieb. The Paideuma focuses on Ezra Pound studies, as well as American and British modernism. The second journal, Sagetrieb, which was founded by Hatlen in 1982, focuses on the study of contemporary and Objectivist poets such as George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky. The Foundation became known for its summer poetry conferences which gathered poets and scholars at the University of Maine. The conference also allowed students and professional, published poets to meet informally and get to know one another, which closely followed Hatlen’s own informal teaching style. Hatlen became director of the National Poetry Foundation in 1991.

Burton Hatlen formed a writing workshop in the late 1960s, with fellow UM colleague, Jim Bishop, and several other writers. These writers included several of Hatlen’s students, including author Stephen King, Tabitha Spruce, poet Sylvester Pollet and Michael Alpert, who currently serves as director of the University of Maine Press as of 2008. Stephen King and Tabitha Spruce later fell in love and married after meeting at Hatlen’s workshops. The members of Hatlen’s writing workshop continued to meet on and off for the next 15 years. Hatlen’s own contributions to the workshop culminated in 1987, when he published his only book of poetry,I Wanted to Tell You. King and Hatlen remained personally and professionally close throughout Hatlen’s life. Hatlen’s helped King develop his own writing style through his workshops. King often sent his unpublished manuscripts to Hatlen for his review and perusal. King told the Bangor Daily News that, “He (Hatlen) saw so much more of what I was doing than I did.” In turn, Hatlen wrote several scholarly essays and critiques of Stephen King’s works. Stephen King named a handful of his fictional characters after Burton Hatlen, including the prison librarian in Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, whom King named Brooks Hatlen. Stephen and Tabitha King donated $4 million dollars to the University of Maine in 1997, which included $1 million dollars specifically for Hatlen to hire new arts and humanities professors.

Burton Hatlen died of pneumonia at the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Maine, on January 21, 2008. He had been undergoing treatment for prostate cancer over the last 10 years. He was 71 years old and is survived by his second wife, Virginia Nees-Hatlen, his two daughters, Julia Hatlen (and partner Mark Hayes) and Inger Hatlen (and husband Joseph Daniels), stepdaughter Hedda Steinhoff, and granddaughter Solveig Daniels. In addition, he is survived by his brother Philip Hatlen, nieces and nephews, and other relatives in California and Norway. Author Stephen King told the Bangor Daily News in reaction to Hatlen’s death that, “Burt was more than a teacher to me. He was also a mentor and a father figure…He made people — and not just me — feel welcome in the company of writers and scholars, and let us know there was a place for us at the table.” source

Bobby Byrd and Joe Hayes

Mary Rising Higgins, George Kalamaras, Mary Ann Cain and Gene Frumkin

Reading at the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque, NM July 19, 2006

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Larry Goodell

Live in Placitas, NM, June 11, 2006 Reading at the Anasazi Fields Winery

Larry Goodell, born in Roswell, NM, and a resident of Placitas since 1963, Larry Goodell’s two main worlds are performing his poetry and inspiring writers through residencies in poetry writing. He feels the most basic challenge for poets now is introducing this art form to a wide audience outside of the traditional academic world and encouraging emerging writers and poets. His work as editor and publisher of duende presshelps him accomplish these goals. Through his residencies, Mr. Goodell demonstrates the miraculous diversity of origins and reveals the oral power of poetry. He works together with his students to write and read and enjoy this oldest and newest subject – poetry. In his own words, “it all boils down to my entertaining and educating other people with the song-chant-word-play-lyric-satire-love-music-sentence-sung-poem writing that is my active life.”He lives in Placitas with his wife Lenore.

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Jim Bishop

JIM BISHOP READS, by Jim Bishop; Vox Audio, Magdalena, N.M., 2007; “Jim Bishop Reads,” a recording of 23 poems made in 2006 by University of Maine English instructor Jim Bishop, revises a previous CD, “Jim Bishop Reads from Mother Tongue,” that was pieced together in 1994 from decades-old recordings and whose distribution was very limited, at the author’s insistence. Bishop’s concern over the quality, not only of the recordings but of the readings, is a key point. Most of the poems on this CD are from Bishop’s book “Mother Tongue,” published in Portland by Contraband Press in 1975. The poems on the earlier CD had been copied from aged cassette tapes; the sound quality was extremely uneven, and so were the performances.

The tracks on this new CD are much cleaner, and the readings, made in June 2006 and uninterrupted by interstitial chatter, have a consistency of articulation and intonation not present before. The poems are even-handedly offered on their own merit, which is significant. The poems from “Mother Tongue,” though more than 30 years old, are well-wrought, introspective, playful, sometimes emotionally knotted, always contemplative depictions of the outer and inner life of one Mainer and many. They resonate on this CD more than ever. In poetry aloud, we have the advantage of hearing the music — the rhythms and pitches — intended to carry those depictions beyond the meanings grasped by the rational brain, and into the heart.

Bishop’s subdued, thoughtful, careful reading intensifies the temperate, surprised, affectionate and sometimes bewildered emotional tone of the poems: were it music i would always almost always play soft my dynamic gradations of piano i would want you bending toward me opens the selection, and the voice develops this theme aloud through descriptions of Maine places, Greek places and Mainers’ sensibilities — “most often they stand” about fishermen talking on the shore; “sentenced to this tongue” about a dream of a beloved son during a sojourn on a Greek island; and the extraordinary “Final Exam,” a dreamlike meditation on imagination, sentimentality and death, not a “Mother Tongue” poem. “Jim Bishop Reads,” like its recent Vox Audio predecessor “Burt Hatlen: New Poems,” is a gratifying glimpse into another of Maine’s resident poets who shared little of his poetry in the local limelight, but has greatly illuminated the whereabouts of those with the patience to wait for the highest available quality. Jim Bishop lives in Bangor and still teaches part time at the University of Maine.

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Chico Martin

Reads. March 2006. Recorded in Magdalena, NM

Chico Martin has been active in the Burlington, Vermont Poets Mimeo Cooperative since its inception in the early 70’s. For 13 years he owned and operated the Alley Beat Bookstore, in Middlebury, Vermont, which specialized in contemporary poetry and small press publications. Chico Martin teaches poetry and writing at Burlington College. His poetry has appeared in a k a, OASii, Puerto del Sol, Sin Fronteras, and :that:. alleybeat.com is published in Bristol, Vermont and edited by Chico Martin.

Bill Sylvester

Reads. February 2006. Recorded in Buffalo, NY

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Todd Moore

Reads. February 2006. Recorded in Magdalena, NM

Todd Moore is a poet in the shockism style. He says, “For your information gansta poetry in this country isn’t Bukowski’s invention, it’s mine. I’ve been making this kind of stuff since 1970 give or take. And, it has nothing to do with Bukowski’s style or subject matter. Bukowski was the pornagrapher of pussy and a damned good one at that. I’m the pornographer of violence.”

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Craig Dworkin & Mary Rising Higgins

Reading in Albuquerque, NM February 2006

Duende & Friends:

A Poetry Reading at the Anasazi Fields Winery January 22, 2006 in Placitas, NM

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John Tritica

Reads. December 2005. Recorded in Magdalena, NM

John Tritica is the co-founder, with Mary Rising Higgins, of L)Edge, a poetry circle now in its 22nd year in Albuquerque, NM. He is the translator of the Swedish poet Niklas Törnlund : All Things Measure Time (The Landlocked Press, 1992). His book How Rain Records Its Alphabet was published in 1998. Sound Remains will appear later this year from Chax Press. He teaches gifted youngsters at Wilson Middle School & engages in backyard farming & soirees.

John Tritica’sSound Remains is as much a book of vision as hearing. Tritica register the emotions and motions of sound, taking a sounding, re-sounding, and tracking auditory adventure. He shows us fresh pathways via the word-routes and the root-words, particularly in the remarkable poem “All Matter Is Encounter,” which presents us with “sound that thinks, thought that resounds.” Tritica asserts that “the hum of the room improves me.” I leave Sound Remains similarly improved, and moved. — Hank Lazer

“Morning rise quiet, Satie’s parade” is one line out of many that defines Tritica’s rhythmic voice in a small space. Satie was a quiet composer, but in this book, the poet activates an intensity of feeling that magnifies the daily views of nature, of family and friends. There is a robust physicality here and the sense of a mind taking in the worth of language to expand being. This is a golden book. — Gene Frumkin

What we have in John Tritica’s poetry is a phenomenology of the everyday, where the barely perceptible world right in front of our eyes and pressing against our skin appears in astonishing beauty and clarity, not as we normally experience it but as the poem allows us to experience it—a constellation of brilliant images, the inner life and music of words, the rush of juxtapostion and mind-body-spirit satori fusion: “a matter of hearing what’s slight significant.” Desert bloom and pulse of the sea create the apparitional expanse against which Tritica plays his magic, his inverted depth of field where “The stillness is illusory / broom grass sifts the breeze.” “All Matter is Encounter,” Tritica proclaims in this poetic manifesto, and all encounter matters when we encounter it by way of the permission granted us in this book of wonder and ecstasy. — George Hartley

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Burt Hatlen

Reads. June 2005. Recorded in Bangor, ME

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Dana Wilde

Reads. Two Essays & a Story, June 2005. Recorded in Troy, ME

Dana Wilde of Troy, Maine, is at present an editor and columnist for the local daily newspaper. In previous lifetimes he served in China and South Africa as a Fulbright lecturer in American literature, taught literature and writing in Bulgaria, Maine and New York, managed a publisher of legal books and directories, played in small-time rock and roll bands, and coached college basketball, among a lot of other dog-eared occupations and divagations. His writings on nature, outer space and literature, some of which have won press and academic awards, have appeared widely over decades and many are now collected at The Mind Errant . Recent essays can be seen in the Amateur Naturalist pages of the Bangor Daily News.

Joseph Somoza

Reads in Placitas, NM, June 2005

Joseph Somoza taught literature and creative writing at NMSU for 22 years, editing poetry for Puerto Del Sol during most of that time. He has published four previous chapbooks and three full books of poetry, the most recent being Cityzen (La Alameda, 2002). He’s done readings of his poems in many venues throughout the country, including The Green Mill (Chicago), Cody’s (Berkeley), The Cornelia Street Cafe (New York), The Elliston Poetry Library (University of Cincinnati), the Mesa (AZ) Literary Festival, and The Living Batch Bookstore (Albuquerque). He lives in Las Cruces with wife Jill, a painter. Jill Somoza has been painting, drawing, papermaking, and doing collage paintings for 40 years. She has experimented with various materials and is currently painting on vinyl, superimposing large, oddly-shaped, translucent panels.

The works shown here are small single-plane pieces of acrylic and photo-transfers on vinyl. She studied art at the University of Iowa, UTEP, and NMSU, and has shown her work at varaious galleries, including The Bridge Center for Contemporary Art in El Paso, Branigan Cultural Center and in “Close To The Border” at the NMSU gallery in Las Cruces, Hansford Gallery in New York, and Sanchez Gallery in San Francisco. Most recently, she had work in the Summer Regional Invitational 2003 at NMSU. She lives with poet Joe Somoza, with whom she raised 3 kids who all have happy, independent lives.

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Bruce Holsapple

Reads. From Vanishing Act, June 2005. Recorded in Magdalena, NM

Bruce Holsapple is currently working in central New Mexico as a speech-language pathologist. He taught briefly and has a scholarly essay on Phil Whalen’s poetry forthcoming in Paideuma. His poems have appeared in The Poker, House Organ, First Intensity and Blue Mesa. Bruce Holsapple is one of the creators ofContraband, the first persistently serious and successful little magazine in Maine, running from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s. Holsapple grew up in Dexter, tended trap lines as a teenager, attended the University of Maine in the late 1960s and hooked up there with mentors and partners like Burt Hatlen and Jim Bishop. After preliminary excursions out of state, he returned to Portland in about 1969, and then with Bishop, Michael Barriault, Peter Kilgore and others, started publishing saddle-stitched collections of poetry, Contraband. Some early issues are worth money on the Stephen and Tabitha King collectors market.

Contraband was, uncommonly, not a matter of two or three cheap issues, then frustration, then oblivion. Holsapple from his nearly windowless room in the attic of 85 Park Street, along with Bishop, Kilgore, Scott Penney and others, read poems, set type, pasted up and distributed the magazine and a number of books. It persisted. Holsapple and Kilgore were instrumental in the founding of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, which began in the mid-1970s as a subcultural cooperative enterprise, much different from the sort of comfy, suburban, quasi-prestigious society it is now.

Mary Rising Higgins

Reads. March 2005. Recorded in Magdalena, NM

Mary Rising Higgins is the author of : red table(S(La Alameda Press, 1999), oclock(Potes and Poets, 2000),)locus TIDES(((Potes and Poets, 2002), and )cliff TIDES(((Singing Horse Press, 2005), Greatest Hits, 1990-2001 (Pudding House 2002), )joule TIDES(((Singing Horse 2007) and Borderlining: Pieces from R and B (Small Chapbook Project 2007) Her poems, published in oversize formats, are carefully patterned and “shaped” on the page both to produce a striking visual component and to invite alternative soundings. Lyn Hejinian says of Higgins’ poetry,“it is work of précise inventions, work of imaginings that are carefully fantastical, compassionately observed.”. Her poems have appeared in such magazines and journals as Blue Mesa Review, Cafe Solo, Big Allis, ecopoetics and Central Park, and she recorded poems for Vox Audio. She lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mary Rising Higgins, innovative poet, friend and colleague of many years, died in Albuquerque on August 26, 2007. Her poetry was startling and radiant, and it had gained well-deserved recognition in recent years.

More on Mary Rising Higgins can be read in an interview in her home in Albuquerque on February 11, 2007, just before her 63rd birthday made by Bruce Holsapple and John Tritica. Two months after the interview, Mary again became ill from complications of breast cancer and began receiving hospice care. She died on August 26, 2007. Please go here… to read the interview.

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Gene Frumkin

Reads. March 2005. Recorded in Magdalena, NM

Gene Frumkin (1928-2007) was an American poet and teacher. Born and raised in New York City and educated at the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A. in English, 1950), Eugene Frumkin worked as a bank teller before beginning his writing career as a journalist. He first took up poetry seriously while enrolled in an adult education class taught by the poet Thomas McGrath. Frumkin was an editor at the Daily Bruin while at UCLA. During the 1950s he was Poetry Editor of the literary journal Coastlines, which he co-founded with Mel Weisburd in 195.In 1966, Frumkin moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to take a teaching position at the University of New Mexico, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. At the University Frumkin edited the Blue Mesa Review and taught a number of students who would go on to distinguished careers, including Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Frumkin’s poetry has appeared in Evergreen Review, Kayak, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and many other literary magazines. His work is noted for its meditative character, its wit, and its unexpected turns and surprises, which show the influence of Surrealism.

Based on Palgrave’s Anthology this stunning collection of great lyric poems in the English language was recorded in 1957. Many of the scratches, crackle and other noises present on the original recordings have been digitally removed. In judging a lyric poem, Palgrave maintained that “passion, colour, and originality cannot atone for serious imperfections in clearness, unity, or truth,… above all, that Excellence should be looked for rather in the Whole that in Parts. Narrated by Claire Bloom, Eric Portman & John Neville.

The Bay Area is rich in local radicals, and most of them have taken a turn at the microphone of the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. Here’s an all-star collection from the speakers’ corner of the bookfair: Jello Biafra, spoken word artist and ex-frontman for punk band Dead Kennedys; Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; author Christian Parenti (Lockdown America); author and punk rocker Craig O’Hara (The Philosophy of Punk); anti-prison activist and author Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Golden Gulag); and Emma Goldman Papers Project curator Barry Pateman cut loose on anarchism, art, prisons, politics and more, in a relaxed setting.

other Norbert Blei web pages

The coop has flown

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Norbert Blei | 1935 – 2013

On the back roads of Door County again

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Bobbie Krinsky

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Jeffrey Winke

Norbert Blei – 2011

Photo by Sharon Auberle

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